MITCHELL, SD (Mitchell Now) — Drivers coming into downtown Mitchell from the north may have noticed something new catching their eye on the corner of 7th Avenue and Main Street.
Leadership Mitchell’s Class of 2026 held a ribbon cutting ceremony on Thursday for their gift to the city, something that has become a tradition for the program at graduation. This year’s group chose to wrap the traffic box at the intersection next to City Hall. A traffic box houses the wiring that tells a light how long it should be red or green for.
Normally, just plain metal hiding under a coat of paint. The 7th and Main box is now decoratively wrapped. The sides facing north and south are adorned with a stylized version of the city logo enlarged to draw attention. The east side, which points towards Lawler Street has photos and facts on the three different versions of the Corn Palace over the years.
The west side looks out at Main Street and has a map of the downtown district, done in a style that mimics the markers put up at other intersections that act as waypoints on the walking tour. The wrap was designed by Tiffany Ellis, part of this year’s Leadership Mitchell class. She works at Dakota Wesleyan University and wanted to take the course to reconnect with her hometown after spending time in Indiana at Ball State University.
Ellis talks about what Leadership Mitchell entails. “We would meet the third Thursday of the month for a day, and we talked a lot about everything Mitchell, so local and county government, we toured a number of industries and businesses. We did Mitchell Day at the legislature in Pierre, and I would say I really enjoyed the entire experience.
“It gave me a reestablished sense of connection to the community, but also a deeper understanding of the way our community works with different industries. We got to tour the John Deere store, we went to the new soybean plant, [and] the corn plant on the other side of town.”
Ellis says her main goal when designing the wrap was to bookend downtown by adding on to what has been done elsewhere. She stresses the importance of “Building continuity of the city’s branding, and that style and identity, and bringing that to the Seventh Avenue and Main corner.”
Finally, Ellis praised the work of Sign Pro as the traffic box presents challenges due to its irregular shape. Filled with sharp angles and odd protrusions, the wrap never becomes hard to understand or decipher. Ellis beams, “They made sure to do the detail in terms of lining up the edges and the cuts, and so it just looks really sleek, and I think that it adds a nice element to that corner.”
